English speech has been enriched from Latin sources; and, secondly, if they teach him at the same time that our mothertongue is no mere daughter of the Latin, but her sister, on terms of perfect equality in virtue of equally ancient and noble birth, and is with her one of the co-heiresses of the unwritten wealth of ages earlier than the birth of either of them, as distinct varieties of human speech.

19. It will be observed that in the English words the whole is printed in capitals, and not merely the root letters, for it was found impossible to maintain consistently in English a distinction which is easily made in Latin; and occasionally English words in capitals are added at the end in brackets in order to suggest their connection with some Latin word, even though, owing to their being of a different part of speech, or from some other cause, they cannot be used as translations of it.

20. Whilst English words which are in any way akin to Latin ones have been thus carefully distinguished (and indeed this is in the author's eyes one of the principal features of the work), it has not been thought advisable, upon the whole, to take any notice of parallel Greek forms, except in some few instances where the borrowing of a Greek word 'readymade,' such as zona, hora, &c., seems to show that the Latins did not possess the idea itself till the comparatively late period when the two languages had become perfectly distinct, and then the word and the idea it expressed were borrowed at the same time. In other cases mere likeness does not prove direct borrowing, but may only hear witness to common origin, the likeness of the cognate words being naturally stronger between two words both of which belong to the southern group of languages, and are mere subdivisions of it (as Latin and Greek are), than between words of which one belongs to the northern and the other to the southern class, as in English and Latin. Indeed, in many cases which are commonly regarded as instances of derivation of Latin words from the Greek, it is much more likely that the Latin word is in reality the more ancient form of the two; just as we have seen that English words may in many instances be older than the Latin (or the Greek) words of the same family. Of course the date of the literature or writings of a language is no sure test of the age of the speech itself or of the words which that speech contains.

CHAPTER II.

FORCE-SUFFIXES.

1. Compound words are formed by placing prepositions or other prefixes before the root: these, however, enter only accidentally into the plan of the present work, which is mainly intended to explain the formation, and trace the history, of Derived words. These are formed in Latin by making additions after the root; and consequently all that part of a word which follows its root usually goes under the general name of Suffixes. It will, however, help greatly to a clear understanding of the matter if we begin by dividing these suffixes into two distinct classes: namely, first, those which are used to form fresh words upon the basis of already existing roots; and, secondly, those which are employed for distinguishing the different parts of the same word—a distinction which it is impossible altogether to get rid of, though it is not easy always to see the exact limits of its application.

2. To the former class we may perhaps give the name of unchangeable, or force-suffixes, because they show the exact force or power by which the root is modified in each new word as it arises; whilst the others (which will be explained more fully in chap. iii.) may be distinguished from them by the name of Inflected or Grammatical Suffixes; because the grammar of a language is chiefly occupied in explaining their forms and the way in which they are used.

3. Now these force-suffixes (like the others) are fragments of earlier words which have ceased to have any independent existence, at all events in Latin; and a very useful book on this subject has been drawn up by Dr. White ('Latin Suffixes,' by Rev. John White: Longmans, 1858), in which he gives the history as well as the usage of most of the Latin Suffixes; and a large number of words are there classified according to their suffixes or endings, somewhat in the same way in which they are here arranged according to their roots or true beginnings. As the author, however, truly states in his preface,

'his work is only intended for those who already possess a moderate acquaintance with Latin, and are prepared to bring reflecting minds to the investigation of its statements.'

4. In addition, therefore, to Dr. White's book, or in place of it, the beginner will do well to avail himself of the excellent List of Suffixes given in Key's Latin Grammar, which is short, and exceedingly well adapted for daily use. He will find all the information he requires about the Force-Suffixes of Substantives in paragraphs 191 to 194; adjectives, 225 to 238; and verbs in 522 to 530, and again 740 to 765. A careful study of the few pages containing these paragraphs, and the habit of often referring to them, will give the pupil an insight into the meaning and structure of Latin words, which he will not easily obtain in any other way; and besides, it will give him an interest in the subject which he has never before felt, because it will teach him to keep his eyes open, and to gather knowledge for himself from every source, instead of being wholly dependent on his dictionary for it.

two.

5. In the Vocabulary I have been careful to keep these force-suffixes as far as possible distinct from the grammatical endings or inflected suffixes, by putting a hyphen between the The part of each word, therefore, which comes after the dark-typed root and before the hyphen may usually be regarded as a force-suffix, and its meaning will be found either in Key's Grammar or in Dr. White's book. In the latter work an account is also given of the various ways in which letters were often introduced into Latin words, merely in order to render their pronunciation easier or more harmonious, just as uneducated people among ourselves say elúm instead of elm. These inserted letters are here printed as if they were a part of the force-suffix itself, because any attempt to distinguish them in print would only have caused confusion.

6. It should be observed that these force-suffixes are much more used in Latin than in our present English. With us a single word, or even a bare root, will often serve equally well for a verb, a substantive, and a sort of adjective, or qualifying word; as in the sentence, 'the iron that those women iron with has an iron handle,' where the very same word iron represents three different parts of speech in succession,

and has consequently three distinct meanings, and must of necessity be represented by three different words in almost any other language. This fact renders the so-called English parsing a very unsatisfactory exercise; whilst in Latin accurate parsing is the only way to acquire a thorough knowledge of the language. For each part of speech has there its own appropriate force-suffix, and consequently Latin parsing has a definiteness and precision which is wholly wanting in English grammar, where the part of speech to which a word belongs is determined much more by its position in the sentence, and by the context, than by the form of the word itself.*

CHAPTER III.

GRAMMATICAL-SUFFIXES OR INFLECTIONS.

1. As force-suffixes added to roots make new words, so it is commonly said that the grammatical inflections of Latin words enable us to distinguish the different parts of the same word. Thus, for instance, aratrum and arator are called different words, because (though formed upon the same root arā—) they have received different force-suffixes, viz. -trum in the one, and -tor in the other; whereas aratoris and aratori are said to be only different parts of the same word arator, because, having the same force-suffix, they differ in their grammatical inflections; and so too with arabam and aravit, which have the same root ar-, and the same force-suffix -a-; but differ, in that one has the inflection -bam, whilst the other has -vit.

2. It would, however, be the simplest account of the matter to say that these grammatical inflections are themselves 'the little words' of the Latin language, because they serve exactly the same purpose which is answered in English (and in a less

* It is said that Chinese is much like English in this respect. The fact seems to be that their language was as it were 'crystallised' in its very infancy, whilst we in our old age have come back to a simplicity from which they have never emerged; thus 'extremes meet' in the first and second childhood of languages as well as of individuals.

degree in most other modern European languages) by the continual recurrence of certain short words, all of which might alike be called 'auxiliaries,' because they help to connect together the chief words of the sentence; and they thus define their bearing upon each other, whilst force-suffixes modify the meaning of the words themselves. In fact, the main difference between the Latin and the English plan is that in English these 'little words' come before the principal one and remain distinct from it in writing (though it is most important to observe that all are pronounced together as one word in correct reading and speaking); whilst in Latin 'the little words' come after the chief one, and stick to it in writing as well as in speech, and, in fact, all are cemented together into one word, as in a piece of conglomerate or plum-pudding stone; which is in like manner made up of many rubbed and worn pebbles, the continual passing through the mouths of men for ages in the one case answering to the never-ceasing grinding of the waves in the other.

3. For example, the Latin 'araveramus' means in English we had ploughed '; but it does not have that meaning because it is 'indicative mood, pluperfect tense, plural number, first person,' for it had exactly the same meaning for many long ages before these grammatical terms were invented as convenient statements of facts already existing in the Latin language; and it is just as certain that the meaning of words does not spring out of the grammatical terms afterwards applied to them, as it is that our measuring the rain when it has fallen has no effect whatever upon the fall of the rain itself.

4. 'Araveramus,' then, has its meaning of ' we had ploughed ' simply because, like its corresponding English phrase, it is " built up' of a number of distinct words, or rather fragments of words, each of which contributes its own separate share to the meaning of the whole conglomerate word. For the root ar- gives first what we put last, viz. the notion of 'ear' or 'plough'; then the force-suffix -a- adds to this the idea of action or doing, and so converts the bare root ar- into the verb ǎrā-. The -v- (which Key says is akin to the w- in our verb was) next comes in, and supplies the notion of com